Married to the Black Widow

A truly harrowing account of one woman's twenty-year campaign of coercive control, lies and manipulation that nearly ended in the murder of an innocent father.

| By: Oliver Daddow | Published: Sep 11, 2026

Rob Parkes, Married to the Black Widow (London: Seven Dials, 2023)

What began as a story of marriage, divorce and a protracted, acrimonious custody battle ended with one woman's conviction for multiple counts of solicitation to murder. This is the harrowing story that Rob Parkes tells in this troubling digest of how his coercive, controlling, and devious former partner, Victoria Breeden, commissioned multiple men to end his life. The book illustrates how dangerous characters such as Breeden cause potential or actual not harm only to their victims. Everyone who came into her orbit suffered “collateral damage in Victoria’s assault” (p295). Their daughter Grace, their families, lovers, partners, work colleagues, schools, doctors, nurses, the emergency services, and courts: countless people had to expend time and energy dealing with Victoria’s cacophony of accusations, falsehoods, threats and violence-by-proxy.

As is often the case with Black Widows, the name given to women who murder, or attempt to murder, intimate partners in domestic settings, Victoria believed her needs and interests took precedence over those of everyone else in her life. Also like other Black Widows – as with Jean Daddow in my book – she believed she was above the law by keeping her distance from the physical act of murder itself. It only took one person to speak up to puncture Victoria's carefully crafted cloak of invincibility. As Rob’s account expertly reveals, Breeden’s downfall took some time to arrive, but when it did it was swift and steep.

Rob met Victoria at university in the north-east of England in the late 1990s. By the time she was tried for solicitation to murder they had known each other for 20 years: as a couple for ten and married for six (p4). Even at the formative stages of their relationship Rob recounts how Victoria displayed signs of jealousy and a propensity to deploy psychological manipulation to keep him, as her partner, fixated on her and her alone. There were multiple splits, only for Victoria to guilt-trip Rob back to her. They married, but Rob cannot really explain why because he already saw red flags in the relationship. Victoria was constantly ‘ill’ and could never hold down a job of her own, requiring 24/7 attention. Their life plans constantly had to change, jobs came and went, they suffered financial hardship and experienced huge emotional stress. They sought second, third, fourth medical opinions for Victoria's alleged medical conditions, up and down the country. No consultant could definitively diagnose an illness. One expert questioned whether it was a psychosomatic rather than a physical problem, but his pertinent line of questioning fell not so much on deaf ears as closed ones. Rob’s social circle diminished to almost nothing as he became Victoria's de facto carer, completely at her beck and call. 

Rob concedes that it is easier to see these toxic dynamics in hindsight than it was to notice them at the time. After all, it was his first serious relationship: he did not know any different. He put up with Victoria's dramatic physical and psychological collapses because she had made him believe he loved her, she loved him, and he was the only person who could truly care for her. “My failure to comprehend what was happening to me was only matched by her success in making sure I never did” (p28). She made Rob feel like her ‘saviour’, preying on his good nature and eventually prompting him to experience “some form of mental breakdown” (p44), which he put down to work pressures. At this juncture Rob had a choice: leave Victoria, or stay with her and make the best of things. For complex reasons that he articulates at some length, Rob decided to stick it out. More than that, they decided it might help their bond if they had a child together.

However, things did not improve, quite the reverse in fact. Victoria now had another yet more potent means of controlling Rob via their daughter Grace. Rob’s draining home life, insecure work life and Victoria’s poor health continued as before, now with the added strain of a young child for whom to care. Ultimately, and way after he now admits he should have done, Rob split from Victoria, having decided that the only way he could save his daughter was by rescuing himself. The “best way I could protect my daughter, in fact the only way I could do that, was to paradoxically leave her … if I didn’t go, Victoria would possess me for the rest of my life and so in April 2008, I moved out” (p67). Initially things looked like they might settle down: “Our separation was calm and settled and for the most part we managed to maintain a level of mutual civility” (p79). It was but a temporary calm. 

With Graced aged four and now living with her mother, Rob discovered that “There were reports of doctors’ visits and prescriptions for antibiotics, nausea, allergies, paleness and sweats so serious that they had needed immediate medical attention – a growing litany of medical requirements” (p89). Every alleged condition or emergency occurred when Grace was alone with her mother. When Rob got hold of a copy of his daughter’s medical records from her doctor, it was a one-and-a-half-inch thick catalogue of medical interventions, “80 percent of which I had no prior knowledge of” (p95). Staff at Grace’s GP surgery had made a social care referral due to concerns around “Fabricated Induced Illness Syndrome” (FIIS), or Maunchausen by Proxy, which involves “exaggerating or inventing symptoms, to deliberately making the child ill”. The sirens were sounding but no further action was taken. Grace’s multiple alleged medical conditions kept on coming (pp124-5).  

Victoria used Grace as a devastatingly effective weapon against her former husband in an arsenal that included spreading malicious gossip about Rob to anyone who would listen, “of drug dealing, gang affiliation or extortion, paedophilia, assault and arson” (p175). Every lie Victoria told said was calculated to undermine Rob and promote her own agenda: “Victoria’s strategy was always to elicit sympathy in others, to somehow make them feel compelled to help or support her” (pp122-3). Spreading gossip and inuendo was one thing, but Victoria also made persistent allegations of domestic abuse, including a confected doorstep argument during which she refused to leave his house. At the same time, Rob began receiving nuisance calls from an unknown number (pp105-6), part of a pattern of intimidation that could lead to only one conclusion: “Victoria seemed hellbent on making life as difficult as she  possibly could … and all of it at Grace’s expense” (p126). The police and courts began, finally, to sit up and take notice. 

With the pair’s relationship at an all-time low, after a lengthy court battle Rob won a Shared Access Agreement: “We had reached the dream, there was nothing else left to wish for; we could all move on and make the most of our lives”. It signalled “a fresh start built on mutual and collective happiness” (p141). Almost straight away, however, Rob was compelled to deal with a Leave to Remove application: Victoria was seeking permission for her and Grace to move to Germany with Victoria’s new partner, army mechanic Wayne Wood (p151). “I had serious concerns … that I wouldn’t ever be able to regain access to [my daughter]” (p156). Victoria's campaign intensified in other ways. One day, Rob recalls, “my six-year-old daughter walked into school and claimed that I had hurt her on purpose” (p164). It was of course completely untrue: “her mummy had told her that if she came to school and said to her teacher that I had hurt her then she would get a lollipop” (p165). Fortunately, in 2012, “Victoria’s application to take the children [Victoria now had a child with Wayne] to Germany had been denied and I would take full parental responsibility for Grace indefinitely” (p180). 

But Victoria was not to be stopped. At New Year 2014 Rob’s phone bleeped with threatening and accusatory messages from a new, unknown number. He was awoken in the middle of the night to find his car ablaze and his house about to burn to the ground. He managed, just, to rush Grace and Jane to safety. As the police investigation got underway, “we had plenty of suspicions and conjecture, but no proof that tied anyone to anything” (p202). Then the police came to Rob with a further worrying development: “We’ve also received credible intelligence that they [Victoria and Wayne] have tried to source a gun with the intention of bringing it back into the UK” (p206). Rob, his daughter and partner were summarily hustled into protective custody due to “the idea of me being at constant risk of being murdered” (p207). 

Wayne was eventually charged with for the car-bombing: his voice matched a hoax 999-call the previous day claiming to be from Rob. Wayne pleaded not guilty, denying it was his voice on the phone and that he had sent the threatening texts. However, the jury found him guilty of Arson with Intent to Endanger Life by a majority of 10-2. He was sentenced to seven years in prison, reduced from nine after mitigation from the defence (p223). Victoria had successfully whipped Wayne up into a frenzy: “She convinced Wayne I was a drug dealer and a paedophile and used him as a weapon to get at me and my family”. But that does not absolve Wayne of responsibility of his actions. 

The denouement, a few years later, is covered in the two-part ‘24 Hours in Police Custody’ television documentary I will review separately on this site. With Wayne having taken the bullet attempting to carry out Victoria’s first plot to kill Rob, there was an intermission. But like a hostile nation-state in a war, the apparent ceasefire was just a pause while Victoria gatheredf money and triedto recruit other men (some of them lovers) to murder Rob. A couple of years after Wayne met justice, the police came to Rob with the shocking news that “we’ve had someone attend the police station with a recording of Victoria and another person conspiring to murder someone … The content of that recording is directed towards yourself” (p243). The whistleblower was Victoria's latest partner, Graham Wall. He had recorded the conversation on his phone hidden in a cupboard while he went to work one day – he thought Victoria was cheating on him. Brazen as you like, Victoria had walked into the police station to collect the phone “as if it was the most normal thing in the world” (p248). She was arrested on the spot. The more I read about Black Widows I realise that their cruelty is only matched by their arrogance and stupidity. 

The prosecution case at the trial in March 2020 was that Victoria had made systematic attempts to seek out and recruit men to kill Rob directly, or to facilitate others who could be persuaded and/or paid to carry out the hit. One such, a neighbour of Victoria's who happened to be a Glaswegian former hardman, said he had been offered £5,000 to do away with Rob (p275). The timing was significant: Victoria had spent the weeks immediately after the car-bombing incident getting the cash together for a fresh hit [although Wayne's arson was unable to be used by the prosecution on legal grounds]. A second witness, who Victoria met while they worked at a dog charity, testified that Victoria told him in no uncertain terms: “I want someone killed” (p279). When this fell on deaf ideas Victoria fell in with a new partner, Graham Wall, who testified that, in February 2019, Victoria had asked him if he knew anyone who could make Rob disappear (p281). Wall was the one who ended up making the recording that ultimately did for Victoria in court. 

The jury was played the footage of Victoria asking one Earl Gernon, who she had met on a dating site (hence Wall's suspicions that she was cheating), “How easy is it to get in contact with someone who can make someone disappear?" Her thinking – as twisted as it was incorrect – was that “if [Rob's] gone, I’ll get my daughter back” (p285). Earl quoted Victoria £15,000 (p294), as calmly as if he was reckoning up the price of installing a new conservatory. In police interview, Victoria could not explain why she had  £18,000 stashed in an upstairs cupboard in baby milk tins sealed with gaffer tape (p301). It was a strikingly similar situation in which Black Widow Jean Daddow found herself after my father’s murder. She had no idea, she said, where the £12,000 in cash she withdrew from a joint bank account prior to the murder could have gone. The investigators later discovered it had been put in a pale blue shoe box and stored on top of her parents’ wardrobe, for her son to collect and drop at the hitman's ashis payment the night of the shooting.     

There are other similarities between the two Black Widows. Throughout the police interviews “Victoria denied wanting to kill, murder, hurt or harm [Rob] in any way whatsoever” (p299), while simultaneously accusing him of being capable and guilty “of some of the most horrific crimes imaginable” (p300). The defence “didn’t try to deny any of what the prosecution had put forward. … Their approach was to suggest that Victoria didn’t really mean it” (p268). Assassinating the victim's character and an ‘it was just rhetoric’ defence were both tactics used by Jean Daddow and her son's defence tgeams to deny conspiring to murder Terry Daddow. Victoria fared no better than them. She was found guilty of three counts of solicitation to murder. Sentencing Breeden in July 2020 at Chelmsford Crown Court Judge Chamberlain lifted the Black Widow's veil of lies and deceit: “The men who testified in this court gave evidence that you actively targeted them and emotionally and psychologically manipulated them into serving your intended purpose: that of ending Mr Parkes’s life” (quoted p5). Psychiatric evaluation, he continued, gave no grounds for mitigation on the grounds of poor mental health. In other words, Victoria knew exactly what she was doing. There were no “pre-existing conditions that would have contributed to the crimes of which she has been convicted” (p309). Breeden was sentenced to nine and a half years.  

Unsettling as it is, this book should be read by anyone who wants to learn more about how Black Widows deploy multiple, subtle techniques of coercive control, how they manipulate everyone in their social circle (including the authorities), and how they scatter lies like confetti: first, to encourage people to feel sorry for them; and secondly, to prompt potential witnesses to look the other way. Black Widows put a lotofwork into cultivating a 'victim' status of their own so they can develop their plots unnoticed. For the actual victims that suffer and/or die at their hands, the Black Widow's machinations, manipulations and distortions of reality operate as the individual bars on an invisible cage. But Black Widows are never as clever as they think they are and can be undone in sometimes the tiniest of ways. Luckily for Rob Parkes, someone was able to help him find the escape key.     
 
Image credits: 
Image 1: author’s own
Image 2: Cambridgeshire Police courtesy Victoria Breeden jailed for trying to get ex-husband murdered - BBC News
Image 3: author’s own
Image 4: author’s own